Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! Let’s start the day off right by catching up on some of the science news you may have missed last week. For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman.
This past Friday, a global outage hit Microsoft Windows devices and caused quite a kerfuffle. Flights all over the world were grounded as several major U.S. airlines, as well as a few international carriers, had problems with their computer systems. In several states 911 services were down on Friday morning, and some foreign banks reported outages, as did many medical facilities around the world.
As of the time of this recording, the culprit seems to be a faulty software update pushed by the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. While it’s obviously a relief that there doesn’t seem to be anything nefarious behind this huge disruption, it’s unclear how long it’s going to take all of the affected services to get back up and running. A reminder, we make this episode on Friday, so we’ll definitely link to more up to date information in our show notes as it becomes available.
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Last week saw the premiere of the new movie Twisters, not to be confused with the old movie Twister. Now, I know that’s not exactly science news, but it is a good excuse to talk about how tornadoes are shifting. Potentially, thanks to climate change. Last Monday at least 22 tornadoes hit the Chicago area. While the majority of tornadoes in the U.S. used to pop up from northern Texas to South Dakota—which is why we call that area Tornado Alley—twisters have been creeping east over the last few decades. And outbreaks, which is where multiple tornadoes spring out of a single storm system, are actually getting more common and moving eastward. That’s a big problem because regions outside of Tornado Alley are way less likely to have infrastructure like storm shelters already in place.
There’s also evidence that twisters are more likely to happen at night in the southeast. That’s for some complicated reasons involving evening driven intensification of an air current that carries moist air up from the gulf, but the important takeaway is that nighttime tornadoes are more than twice as likely to cause fatalities than ones that strike during the day
If you want to learn more about the shifting science of tornadoes, check out the link in our show notes to see a short SciAm documentary that follows some of the brave and bold scientists who chase down twisters.
[CLIP: Chaser audio from Tornado Symphony
Brian Emfinger: There’s a little bit of a lowering right there right now.
Andy Wallace: It’s reforming again. I think you may need to move east just to get out of the construction zone.
Mike Olbinski: The rain’s coming. I think we should move.
Wallace: Right toward us. Okay, tighten up. Make it work.
Emfinger: Okay, so be ready to—be ready to get the hell out of here.
Brett Wright: Uh, it’s still going. I see the left edge there I think.
Emfinger: That’s it right there. You gotta get out of here.]
Feltman: Eat your heart out, Glen Powell!
I’ve got some bad news for your marine disaster movie screenplay: scientists say they’re now able to predict so-called rogue waves up to five minutes in advance. A wave gets rogue status when it grows to double the average size of the tallest waves around it. These walls of water seem to come out of nowhere—in fact, they often pop up in surprising directions relative to the waves around them and the prevailing winds.
A study published last Thursday describes a neural network trained to suss out which waves hint that rogues might be on the way. To train it, the researchers fed the neural network around 14 million different 30-minute-long strings of sea-surface-elevation data from 172 buoys. The researchers say their tool could predict 75 percent of rogue waves 60 seconds in advance and 73 percent with five minutes’ notice. The tool even had similar success predicting a few rogue waves based on data from buoys that weren’t used to train the neural network. But the system gobble up a bunch more data before it can warn ships in all oceans across the globe.
I don’t have a good segue for this that doesn’t reference the movie Moonfall, so let’s just dig in: data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has apparently revealed evidence of a cave on the moon. The data leads them to believe that the deep Mare Tranquillitatis pit leads to a cave at least 130 feet wide, which is almost enough to squeeze in two whole tennis courts end to end—so much room for activities!
That’s actually kind of exactly what the researchers said, though, without the tennis part. They suggested that future astronauts might use the structures as a natural shelter. These caves could help protect them from cosmic radiation and temperature fluctuations on the surface.There are more than 200 pits on the moon that we already know about possibly formed by past volcanic activity, and scientists are excited to see whether they might also feature cave systems and secret tunnels.
Let’s make a quick pit stop for some public health news before we get back to the stars. I could give you a whole laundry list of updates about measles and bird flu, etc, but for this week I’ll keep it simple. Don’t pick up a raw milk habit. It is simply not the time. If you’re concerned about industrial farming, I absolutely hear you.
Find a small local farm you like the look of that also pasteurizes their dairy and go buy milk from them. Everybody wins. Also, vaccinate your kids! It’s wild out there, but today we’re going to focus on COVID, which, yes, is still very much a thing. Take it from me, a person with a very silly list of chronic illness symptoms that several very smart doctors tell me is largely thanks to my “minor” run-ins with COVID.
How fun.
Last Wednesday a new study on long COVID came out in the New England Journal of Medicine, and a lot of the headlines about it are focusing on the fact that the risk of long COVID seems to have dropped as the virus evolved, but even more so as folks got vaccinated. That’s true—and it’s also great news—but the study also noted an ongoing “substantial” risk of chronic, debilitating symptoms.
And, yeah, COVID seems to be surging again. According to the CDC, wastewater testing currently shows “high” or “very high” levels of coronavirus activity in at least half the states in the U.S. And President Joe Biden made headlines last Wednesday when he tested positive for COVID after displaying mild symptoms. Photos showed him exiting a car, surrounded by Secret Service, and then entering Air Force One, all without wearing a mask. Dear Mr. President: Please mask up! The evidence is clear: masks help us lower our risk of transmission and having mild symptoms doesn’t mean you won’t make someone else seriously ill, especially in the long term.
And hey, listeners, I know it can feel like a pain. I really do. But I would honestly consider it a personal favor to me if you started wearing masks again, at least in enclosed spaces and among crowds, and especially if you have the sniffles and you can’t stay home. Okay? All right. Now I think we could all use a little space.
The annual Perseid meteor shower is here and sticking around until late August, so get outside and peep some shooting stars. This annual spectacle comes to us courtesy of Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle.
The comet itself takes 133 years to orbit the sun and last made a near pass by us in 1992, so we won’t see it up close again for a long time. But Swiftie also leaves a trail of dust and debris along its orbital path that Earth passes through each year. When those cosmic dust bunnies collide with our atmosphere, they burn up so dramatically that we literally make wishes on them. That’s a pretty theatrical end for what’s basically a clod of space dirt.
The shower is expected to peak on the evening of August 11 for folks in the U.S., and that big show could feature anywhere from a few dozen to a couple hundred shooting stars every hour. But you can start keeping an eye out for meteors anytime you please. NASA’s advice is that you get to the darkest location you can to improve your visibility, aim for nights with clear skies, and settle in for a long evening. Meteors get easier to spot as your eyes adjust to the dark, so you don’t want to rush it. Plus, you might need to spend quite a while staring at the sky if you want to catch some, depending on how much comet trash we happen to be obliterating on any given evening. So, bring a blanket, some warm layers, snacks and drinks, and friends to make the most of the night.
Then look towards the constellation Perseus, which is where the meteors will appear to originate.
That’s all for this week’s News Roundup. We’ll be back on Wednesday with an expert on advanced meditation who wants to teach us all how to change our minds for the better. And hey, if you’ve got a second, do me a favor and rate and review us wherever you’re listening to the show right now. It really helps us find new listeners.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper and Jeff DelViscio. Madison Goldberg and Anaissa Ruiz Tejada edit our show, with fact-checking from Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. See you next time!
